Mao's Life

revolution and set up the first rural revolutionary base area of the CPC. In 1928, his troops joined forces with the insurgent troops of Zhu De to form the Fourth Army of the Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Army (later renamed the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army), with Mao Zedong as Party representative and Secretary of the Front Committee, and Zhu De as Army Commander. Proceeding from the reality of China, the Chinese Communists with Mao Zedong as their chief representative developed armed struggle in rural areas where the forces of the Kuomintang rule were weak, and opened up the road to the final seizure of the country's political power by encircling the cities from the rural areas and then capturing them. Mao Zedong expounded this issue theoretically in his works such as "Why Is It That Red Political Power Can Exist in China?" and "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire." In his "Oppose Book Worship" written in May 1930, he made the famous assertion "no investigation no right to speak." In August of the same year, the First Front Army of the Red Army was established with Mao Zedong as general political commissar. In 1931, the Provisional Central Government of the Chinese Soviet Republic was established in Ruijin, Jiangxi Province, and Mao Zedong was elected its Chairman. In a by-election in 1933, he was elected into the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee. Beginning from the end of 1930, Mao Zedong and Zhu De led the First Front Army of the Red Army in defeating Kuomintang campaigns of encirclement and suppression. Arriving in the Central Revolutionary Base Area, the "Left" deviationist leadership collective represented by Wang Ming deprived Mao Zedong of his leadership in the Party and the Red Army and adopted different strategies and policies, leading to the failure in the fight against the fifth Kuomintang campaign of encirclement and suppression. In October 1934, Mao Zedong joined the First Front Army of the Red Army in the Long March. In January 1935, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee held an enlarged meeting (known as the Zunyi Meeting) on the way of the Long March, at which the new central leadership represented by Mao Zedong was established. In October of the same year, the CPC Central Committee and the First Front Army of the Red Army arrived in northern Shaanxi, and the Long March ended. In December 1935, Mao Zedong delivered the report "On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism" to expound the policy of national united front against Japanese aggression. In October 1936, the Fourth and Second Front Armies of the Red Army completed the Long March and reached Gansu to join forces successively with the First Front Army. Working together with Zhou Enlai and others in December of the same year, Mao Zedong brought about the peaceful settlement of the Xi'an Incident. This was crucial for a shift in the national situation from the civil war to the second period of Kuomintang-Communist cooperation against Japanese aggression. In December 1936, Mao Zedong wrote "Problems of Strategy in China's Revolutionary War." He wrote "On Practice" and "On Contradiction" in the summer of 1937.